Reluctant Gravities

by Rosmarie Waldrop

Once again poet and translator Rosmarie Waldrop pushes the boundaries and definitions of poetry, prose, gender, relationship, even language itself in her new volume of prose poem "dialogues", Reluctant Gravities. Intended as a sequel to The Reproduction of Profiles and Lawn of Excluded Middle, Reluctant Gravities gives the rhetorical "you" addressed in those earlier volumes a voice and response. "I decided to give the second person equal time", says Waldrop. "But I'm not interested in characters, psychology, or in poetry's traditional 'persona' or mask. The voices do not 'represent, ' but frame the synaptic space between them". Some of Waldrop's concerns are formal. She "cultivates cuts, discontinuity, leaps, shifts of reference" in her attempts to compensate for the lack of a margin, where verse would turn toward the white of the page, toward what is not. Her "gap gardening tries to place the margin, the emptiness inside the text". But the point of the dialogues is purely human as the two voices with wit and philosophical playfulness debate aspects of "Aging", "Depression", "Desire", and even "The Millennium". Author of over 15 books of poetry, prize-winning translator of Jabes and Celan, teacher, and (with husband Keith Waldrop) publisher of Burning Deck Press, Rosmarie Waldrop keeps re-establishing herself as one of our foremost avant-garde stylists and most original poet-philosophers.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1999

About the author

Rosmarie Waldrop (born August 24, 1935), née Sebald, is a contemporary American poet, translator and publisher. Born in Germany, she has lived in the United States since 1958. She has lived in Providence, Rhode Island since the late 1960s. Waldrop is coeditor and publisher of Burning Deck Press, as well as the author or coauthor (as of 2006) of 17 books of poetry, two novels, and three books of criticism.

Reviews

[juch]

Rly enchanted by the first few pages that described the process of reading in surprising fleshy metaphors. The rest of this book had some similar stunning moments, like when she hones in on skipping stones and senses of self in “on aging,” though I found the general experience soupy, despite the specificity of the titles. If I read carelessly, things would blur together but then if I locked back in, something would click. Maybe just a book meant to be reread in small bursts

[Srinaath · Rating 5 out of 5]

Waldrop signature “gap-gardening” style drips with aesthetic but leaves the writing edgeless, less than concrete. Her writing is inventive, authentic, and cross-disciplinary. But the gaps are often too wide, the meaning too sparse. I follow the dots but can’t connect them. Her writing always inspires me to write more, to fill in the blanks she’s left.

[Nico · Rating 5 out of 5]

Two voices on the page discourse on a matter of topics in an abstract modality of writing. Waldrop meditates upon a new relation of word and narrative to create a spaceless space of presences and absences where these two voices dialogue. The writing is abstract and, of course, poetic and comes across as dealing with a kind of phenomenology of the body, of perception, memory, sexual differentiation, the gap between childhood and adulthood. As the back of the book says, Waldrop’s style of “gap gardening tries to place the margin, the emptiness inside the text.” Perhaps in a sense, where to go without a centre in the text? A centreless text, the free play of signifiers. Yet, even with a high amount of abstraction there is a light, near lyrical touch in the humanity of the voices. As abstract as their language is, the things they discourse and dialogue on are important domains of human experience and being in the world. Here, Waldrop emphasises becoming over being and the boundless experience of change within life. As He says “We must decipher our lives… forward and backward, down through cracks in the crystal to excrement, entrails, formation of cells” (11). And more so on this space and the voices, Waldrop plays a lot with gender significations, even as abstractly through simple pronouns as He and She. He isn’t so distinctly He nor She so distinctly She, they are more androgynous and remain with a space of the neutral. Much of the writing here does really remind me of Blanchot and Jabès, who I cannot doubt were two of her highest influences. Waldrop’s writing seems to exist within this state of the neutral. Reluctant Gravities is an incredible book of beautiful and abstract sentences that touch upon deep meditations of the human experience.

Her language use is very interesting too, bridging a gap between poetry, scientific terms, and philosophy. But she does all this without having to be on the nose about it — a lot of the writing has to do with perception and the changes within it. In an ephemeral world, can our perception ever accurately render the world, as it is rendered through projections of memory, impressions, and our experience of being? A lot of this is touched upon through childhood memories and photographs. Yet, all of these still distort the world through our position and perspective, is it possible to authentically see the world?

Also I’m curious if there is a sense of some Freudo-Lacanism here. Waldrop touches a lot upon the mirror stage and sexual differentiations I imagine there is some psychoanalytic symbolism working throughout.

[Bella Moses · Rating 4 out of 5]

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